check_files.pl – Check files age and number of files in a directory

Project Notes

For help and list of options do:
./check_files.pl --help

The documentation in the help should be enough to get you started. The plugin despite large amount of code (to support threshold spec) is not that complex - all it does is sum number of files and alert if its too many, plus optionally track what is the oldest file.

The plugin is based on check_netstat.pl 0.35 and as such shares threshold spec syntax with all my other plugins and supports slightly extended nagios plugin specification threshold syntax.

The plugin itself does "ls -l" and parses that data. Depending on the options it can also add "-R" for recursion or may try to list only specific files you're looking for for large directories. I've chosen parsing "ls -l" over doing lower level direntry calls because parsing allows to use the plugin to process results from a remote system where all you need to do is execute "ls -l". To support such use the plugin has "-I" parameter telling plugin to process STDIN data as "ls -l" as well as "-C" parameter which allows to specify command in place of "ls -l" so you can substitute ssh or something else in there.

Example of use is:

define command {
command_name check_err_files
command_line $USER1$/check_files.pl -f -D $ARG1$ -F $ARG2$ -w $ARG3$ -c $ARG4$
}

define service{
use prod-service
host_name you_know_who
service_description File Checks for error files
check_command check_err_files!/var/someplace/somewhere!"*.error"!2!5
}

If executing this remotely by snmp (which is rare, but I do it this way) example is:
define command {
command_name check_bysnmp_errfiles
command_line $USER1$/check_by_snmp.pl -E someplace_fileslist -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -l snmpuser -x 'onesecret' -L sha,aes -X 'anothersecret' -S --exec $USER1$/check_files.pl -f -I -F $ARG1$ -w $ARG2$ -c $ARG3$
}